Informing action for a sustainable future
The global membership organisation for sustainability standards – ISEAL Alliance, launched their ambitious Evidensia digital platform at the exciting Global Sustainability Standards Symposium in The Hague. Designed and developed by Createful, the purpose of the platform is to facilitate access to evidence about the impacts of sustainability standards and other supply chain sustainability systems.
The ambition of Evidensia is to place credible evidence at the heart of sustainability actions and decisions. To date much of the available information has not been presented in a user friendly way. According to Vidya Rangan of ISEAL “This makes it difficult for decision-makers to easily identify and understand what information already exists about the impacts, effectiveness and business value of sustainability initiatives.”
To ensure the new platform meets the needs of its intended user base we worked with ISEAL to coordinate and run a lean usability testing exercise to validate our design thinking on core areas of the upcoming platform.
An important part of the design process for any project, large or small, this was particularly critical for ISEAL’s new platform because of its unique proposition. We needed to make sure that users from both corporate and government backgrounds as well as research-savvy individuals would be able to interact with the platform in an intuitive way and be able to locate valuable information and insights easily.
Createful’s facilitation of the usability testing process, with key users and customers of Evidensia, was well paced, carefully communicated, and expertly led on each of the several test calls I observed.
Working from our lab in Bournemouth, we tested our prototype of the Evidensia platform with ten participants across six countries within a week.
A key focus of the testing was on a powerful faceted search mechanism, which allows users to locate results via a multitude of filters across several dimensions. It was important that the depth of resources and the specificity by which users could search was clearly communicated, without alienating users whose roles or technical ability require a more high-level view of what’s available.
The client came away from the session having experienced first-hand how our collaborative ideas performed, which gave us a clear direction in terms of further enhancement and helped to cement the relationship.
We followed the lean test sessions by producing a report summarising the key insights and a suite of priority recommendations for implementing solutions to the core problems users encountered.
Through the implementation of these insights we are proud to have been able to deliver a robust repository of evidence on the impacts and effectiveness of leading supply chain tools addressing key sustainability issues.
You can see the platform in action here: www.evidensia.eco
Or dive deeper into our dev team’s technical approach in this journal article
An exciting project, marrying data mining and advanced search with interactive analysis to give visibility to the available sustainability research.
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